How To Find Unrouted Nets with Eagle CAD

One day, after design your layout and send the Gerber files to PCB manufacturing, but after your PCB arrived you just realized that your PCB missed some traces!

What will you gonna do? Maybe you just throw it out, or attached some wires to fix it. Why? You don’t need to get stressed from your owns mistake if you know how to inspect your board well before send it to manufacturing. There is always a chance of errors when you design a board. I want to let you know how to see unrouted nets when you are designing a board. As Eagle CAD user, you’ll find this guide really useful.

There are ways to manage such a problem. Keep this in mind when you are design a board and everything should be okay. First, I’ll show you how to find unrouted nets from the layer settings menu. You can find this button on “View” and then click “Layer  settings” or look at your left Eagle window and click an image like this below symbol which I marked with red circle.

Then a new pop-up window will appear, and click “None” and you just have to click the “unrouted” layer, then click “Apply” and “OK”.

When all of this step already taken, you can inspect which nets that still unrouted.

I will show you another trick with typing. Eagle is really good software which has tools to inspect unrouted nets. Type “run length” and you’ll see pop-up window appeared and just click “Ok”. Another pop-up window will give information about wire length of layout, and at the right of the window you can see unrouted information like below picture.

If none unrouted nets were found, the information just shows --.

Please bear in mind, when you do board layout, please check if your board and schematic has a consistency. You can use your ERC button to make sure. You can choose this button from “Tools’ in the top of Eagle menu. If there are no errors anymore, the bottom of your Eagle will show a text “no errors / warnings“. 

On your bottom right Eagle window there is one little circle with some color if your board finished, if f/b annotation between your schematic and board has consistency, the circle will show green color, if none your circle will show another color. See below picture about the warning if your schematic and board are not consistent.

By the way, you can see my method to find component easily with Eagle CAD.
I hope you could find this little guide helpful, thank you.

Find Component Easily with Eagle CAD

Many people around the world, especially whom are tinkering with electronics knew this software. I have some difficulty when using this software for the first time, I couldn’t find components which I want easily, when I type component’s name in the search button, it was really hard to manage it. I made this below picture as an example.

You can see when I type cap as a capacitor short name. There is no result about capacitors. The results just fuse and inductor neosid, except if you added library files from Sparkfun website. They have made capacitor library name as “cap xxx” so it will show if you use this method, but what if you don’t use them libraries in your Eagle CAD?

 The method I will show just a simple method but you’ll find this is really useful when you are using Eagle CAD. You don’t need incredible knowledge to manage this, you just need a little time to read my tip here and you’ll find whatever components you wanted. Eagle CAD was really impressed when I use it for the first time, GUI was really friendly and attractive, full of color, you can attach polygon easily too.

Just one sentence could expressed by myself, awesome friendly GUI software !! I couldn’t help myself away from Eagle CAD. I have used other software and it was good enough, but I still like Eagle CAD more than it. Please don’t ask me to shout another software name, no offense.
The next step from this tip is about typing, if you type capacitor, of course you’ll find capacitor components, but we need a faster time to build the schematic !! If you type resistor, capacitor, inductor, transformer, bla bla bla…ougggghhh please don’t. I usually type resis for resistor, cap for capacitor and it was really saved my time. Okay, I’ve talked a lot. Just add *components name* in search button and you’ll be ready to use Eagle CAD easily.

See below picture as example, I type *cap* and you can see capacitor were shown.

Below picture as example when I type *resis*.

You just need a little creativity when you type for components name, if you type *rel* to find relay, it was sure you’ll found it. This method can be used to find any components that you need. Just open your Eagle CAD now and you are ready to go. Have a good day and thank you for coming here.